Purveyors of: Life as an instrumental
File Next To: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tortoise
Play Saturday, February 16 @ The Great Hall Upstairs

Wavelength programmer Kevin Parnell fell in love with Do Make Say Think after seeing them at his first Wavelength show in 2001. Twelve years later they are still his favourite Toronto band. With DMST recently returning to their seminal 2000 album Goodbye Enemy Airship The Landlord Is Dead at shows in Europe, Kevin caught up with multi-instrumentalist Charles Spearin to see what life is like for DMST, 13 years and five albums later.

What's it like as a band revisiting material you created more than 12 years ago? I imagine it must bring back a lot of old memories and personal moments.

To have to relearn Goodbye Enemy Airship The Landlord Is Dead in its entirety was a joy. I remember before we started rehearsing, putting on my headphones and thinking “okay, I'll go over a few bass lines to make sure I can remember all this stuff” and then finding myself completely emotionally overwhelmed and frozen to the spot until the very last note. I fucking love that record. It's so abstract and yet so personal. It's me and my friends struggling, sometimes flailing, with the complications of life and utterly filled with fire. I once heard the word “patience” defined as “the absence of anger,” which is a beautiful thought, but to me GEATLID was the album that taught us to be patient and still be passionate.

While being mostly instrumental, each DMST record is very evocative and feels quite personal. Outside of melody and rhythm and jamming until something feels right, do you write songs from stories and moments in your lives, addressing them with mood and tone rather than with lyrics?

When we write music, we don't often begin with goal in mind or a specific vision of where the song is going. We spend a lot of time just picking up instruments and listening to what our hands do until we find ourselves kind of stirred by what we hear. Then we go in that direction. Ultimately, if we're on the right track we find out a little more about what's going on inside us. It's like musical Tarot cards or something. We may be surprised at what notes we play but there could be something there to learn from. Then, once we learn, we can distill it and clarify it and offer it to whoever cares to listen. Even though it remains abstract throughout, it's been hammered and purified somehow.

DMST’s members are all involved in countless side projects, other headlining bands, film scoring, child-rearing, and life in general. How does DMST work as a band with
everything else going on?

We do what we can. Usually we write together, record bed tracks and then Justin (Small), Ohad (Benchitrit) and myself overdub, rearrange and muck about with it until it feels done. As a band, Do Make Say Think often ends up on the back burner but because we don't really have an agenda, we're not trying to “make it” or any of that nonsense, and we don't have any dubious record-label obligations, we have space to live our lives and be involved in other projects and do whatever we like. We've been a band for 16 years or so and only put out six records. That's not exactly a breakneck pace but at least everything we've done still sounds sincere to my ears.

For 16 years, DMST has shared the same core members, a group of friends who have grown up together and the music you make reflects that. It feels very honest; music made for no other reason than simply because you wanted to make it together. Is DMST a place to come together with people who have known you forever, through good and bad, a sort of place to reflect, to ground yourself?

That sounds really nice. But it's a little too idyllic-sounding. We have known each other forever, yes, but we certainly don't always see eye to eye. Unless you mean “ground yourself” like coming home to a slightly dysfunctional family where you have the same arguments over and over, but somehow still manage to laugh a lot, then yes, we are like brothers. But one of the reasons we have all these other projects is because we drive each other a bit nuts and need to go our own way once in a while. Do Make Say Think really is the artistic common ground of five people. Brothers or not, repeatedly finding that common ground and not treading the same paths again and again is hard work.